I was glad to see Vygotsky in The Prehistory of the Written Word give more attention to Maria Montessori’s methods than you ever find in the research literature. I was disappointed, however, for him to slight her for having children writing a message prepared by an adult – which I’m not quite sure is the right conclusion to draw. He must have been reading Chapters XV, XVI, XVII of The Montessori Method by MM published in 1912. I am not trained as a Montessori primary teacher but I have been in primary classrooms, done preparatory training on the preschool Montessori program as part of my elementary training, and I have read her work. I don’t want to quibble with Vygotsky but do want to put her work into perspective and raise the question of what might be different between a research informed pedagogy and research on pedagogy.
First, Vygotsky and Montessori have a lot in common. They were both trained as doctors and both worked with children with special needs before they went onto develop their own view of children’s development and learning. Secondly, both of them are very acute observers of children. For Montessori, she made observation a keystone of her method of education. Thirdly, social interaction between children and adults is a key part of learning. Montessori has more than a few pithy comments to make about the “dominance of adults” and the need for the adult to support the independence of the child.
Why did Vygotsky choose to talk about Montessori and writing in the first place? That is because, even after 100 years, Montessori is still the only researcher/educator who placed writing first in the sequence of reading and writing. I won’t go through all the speech and naming lessons the youngest children go through that correlate to Vygotsky’s presentation of a child’s language development. What she did come up with is a way to help a child express their view of the world around them before they reached the age when writing was typically taught. She noticed that muscle control would be a problem for them working with pens and writing letters. So, exercises where children colored in metal insets were devised to develop their control.
Even so, taking their growing knowledge of speech sounds and symbols and getting to writing is a major effort. She had earlier had an environment with lots of little objects that would help lead to the development, indirectly, of a sense of sounds and symbols. Then, and only when the child was at the right point, based upon observation, the sounds of the words the child was “toying with”, “trying out”, “playing with” were helped by a wooden alphabet.
The child doesn’t have to write, through a series of lesson they come to choose from the box the letters that make the word they want to “write”. With the aid of an adult, they “write” their word. It is their word, their writing. The spontaneous explosion into writing that Montessori wrote about was a child whose voice, whose speech, came through symbols that they knew were shared by adults and other children.
Reading comes later. Writing comes first. As Adams notes, in Beginning to Read, only Montessori puts writing before reading. The explosion is because the child’s voice is made primary in the move into a complex symbol system.
Yes, the classroom had slips that children read and copy. It is after all a classroom and Montessori thought there should be 40 children and 1 asssistant. Since, there are three age levels in the classroom, that meant that about 13 to 14 children were active in the afternoons working specifically on language work. They could choose during the day to do such work but the classroom was designed for them to be able to do it without an adult at hand. They were prepared to do what would suit them.
Three age levels, 3, 4, and 5 year olds meant that children saw older children working on lessons that they knew they would come to in time. Language was around them and an adult would guide them to it when after careful observation they were ready.
I think that Vygotsky like Dewey, both of whom did not go on to the enormous work of developing a pedagogy that matched what they were learning about children’s learning and development, offer one side of research and theory. Montessori offers another. Yes, I am partisan but with reason. I am in the world of praxis.
Back to the message that Vygotsky refers to, written by a child to the visiting Princess Maria and the civil engineer Eduardo Talamo. I mean, really, the children are preparing for an accomplished engineer and a princess to visit their classroom. The message, the care, the accomplishement astonishes us. It must be copied. But no, it is a child’s interpretation of a ritual, of a welcoming speech. Children copy. They mimic. But I read the message and I see a child, children. They have many ways of grasping and making the world their own. But Montessori would never put an adult in a position where the voice of a child was not first and foremost.
